A broader dimension of this that nobody has noted is the WH focus on "coalition," starting with NATO as an anchor. What is in prospect is a new world government (in the form of military-security federation) that explicitly rejects the sovereignty of any nation that doesn't 'join.' In this context, the prospect of a "world war on terrorism" means a new institutional shape in world politics.
mbs
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I wonder how long this fake international solidarity to wipe out a theoretically universal enemy will last. The US govt of course sees its enemies as universal because it considers itself the center of the universe. I wonder how the EU, Russia, or those parts of Asia with large Islamic populations see these same so-called enemies?
Tuesday's terrorism has turned a classic contradiction: by attacking the symbols of Capital and Empire it has managed to dis-organize the most progressive elements of a society, and re-inforced the most repressive elements of a society.
The political debate over the role of terror has been in literature for a long time. And the results are presented in almost the same breath. The Right unifies popular resolve, gains the moral high ground and the frightened bourgeois cling to repression in hopes of regaining their shattered security. Meanwhile, the left loses all of its middle ground, its moral credibility, and most of its political leverage.
Since there was just the beginning of a collective realization that the US was nothing more than a vast ugly imperialist power, milking the earth and all its people of every once of human and natural resource possible---since that was just beginning to get home to ordinary working people here (SF Bay Area), the more concrete political effect of Tuesday's terrorism was to erase expressions of that collective understanding in an instant.
It's been very convienently replaced with a kind of nationalist hysteria, hyped up with wall to wall mass media mantras of moral outrage, and assurances that we will rise from the ashes to recover America back to Business as usual, while demanding free reign to slaughter at will. The ludicious images of Congress scurrying out the doors several times in the last day or two in paranoid historics as if they were literally in a sniper's cross hairs should bring peels of derision and contempt. That the political elite found communion and solidarity at church in their Day of Remembrance today should be laughable. Yet nobody is laughing---and they should be.
This isn't WWII, Bush is no Roosevelt, and singing Protestant hymns in the National Cathedral in DC over four plane crashes just doesn't have the same presentiment of vast struggles ahead that going to war on two fronts against industrial giants in Europe and Asia did sixty years ago. And you can bet there were no 9.00/hr humble present at the church services in DC today.
While it might be appropriate to tune down some of the specifics of a so-called left agenda, I think it would be a profound political mistake to simply be quiet. I have to mention that the vote on the security and war thumping bills in the House today was 420:1, with Barbara Lee (D) from Oakland as the only dissent. From conversations in my neighborhood and work, she definitely represents the mood on the street. Nobody here is interested in random war on the entire Muslim world, or wall themselves up in maximum security lockdown for the duration.
Despite the obvious symbolism of the targets in NYC and DC, there is this pretense that gosh, how could such nasty people hate us so much? My answer is, what do you mean `us'?
The deepest problem is to find the political methods to separate out this absurd mass identification with the interests of Capital and Empire. Clearly the WTC and the Pentagon had little or nothing to do with the interests of ordinary people. While plenty of people died, many in public services like the Fire Dept, that is an entirely different matter than the political and economic interests of Capital and Empire, and it seems imperative to me, that these be separated. Key to that separation is to create the rhetorical means and their political expressions to isolate the interest of Capital and Empire from the various popular conceptions that these are tantamount to `our way of life.'
The WTC and the Pentagon are not representative of my way of life, obviously, so I feel no threat whatsoever. Somehow that personal feeling has to be translated into rhetorical and political expressions that cover a much broader range of people. I can think of several elements. First it seems obvious to me that Capital and Empire hide behind the people, pushing them out in front to take all the blows intended for Capital and Empire. Somehow that sort of fundamental cowardice has to be made more explicit. Here, you all go out to suffer and die, so we can set back here content to thrive and prosper. This is the ultimate form of socializing the costs to the people and privatizing the benefits to the elites. The grand extension of this general plan is to completely socialize the costs, that is expose all the population to terrorism and war, in order to protect an ever tighter circle of the privilaged. That is what is essentially involved in almost all these current legislative moves. Pulling the pants down on that butt is the trick.
Chuck Grime